CultureGeek

BookGeek: Harlan Ellison's Watching

Having met the man several times, I shudder to imagine Harlan Ellison's responses to my reviews. Rest assured, Ghost of Harlan, that I do sincerely love and respect the art of filmmaking as well as literature and the craft of writing, so I will nervously skate past your rant about reviewer dilettantes drooling on unworthy fare.

If you met him, you know Harlan Ellison can rant about almost anything. This collection of his column, "Watching," covers the gamut of much of the 1980s in film with a not-inconsiderable number of detours and digressions. At least half a column is devoted, at one point, to showering annoyance at the letter-writers insisting that his column should be canceled, as it was arguably one of the most popular items in the magazine.

It's funny to me that as much as I disagreed with Harlan on so many things, his language still manages to fascinate me. He hated Back to the Future, Star Wars and almost everything Steven Spielberg ever did, and loved Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Kubrick's version of The Shining.Odds are we would have argued a great deal at the movie theater if I hadn't been petrified of him. (It's hard to argue with your idols.)

And yet it is the language that kept me reading, even when I was shaking my head, "No, Harlan, you've got it all wrong..." His diatribes on separating art from artist, the cultural and political implications behind art, his analysis of the complexity in popular culture, these were all fascinating even when he argued that Star Trek: The Motionless Picture was art. (To be fair, he also said it was woebegone and predictable, riddled with plot hols and stultifying in pace, all of which are true.) But then he who had a love-hate-hate with Trek all his career encapsulated its abiding principle with this:

...the unswervable dedication to the concept that the youthful human race is intrinsically noble and capable of living with equanimity in the universe. It is an important thought, and one that is denied in both Star Wars and Close Encounters. Unlike these previously adored 'sci-fi' simplicities, Star Trek: TMP does not tell us that we are too base, too dull and too venal to save ourselves and to prevail in an uncaring universe without the help of some kind of bogus Jesus-Saves Force or a Pillsbury Doughboy in a galactic chandelier. It says we are the children of Creation and if we are courageous, ethical and steadfast we can achieve our place in the light of many suns. I take that to be a worthy message.

This is a message rarely seen in the reviews of Star Trek movies or shows, and one that better expresses its themes than most of those carrying its torch today. (Also, he hated when starships make whoosh sounds in space, which knocked out most 1980s sci-fi for him.)

For The War Lord by Franklin Schaffner, he actually walked out. "It is the most obstinately endless film ever made. It has all the appeal of attendance at a snails' convention." I would steal this phrase for certain deadly-dull "classics" if I wasn't afraid Harlan's ghost would backhand me upside the head for the theft.

In a review of Les Carabiniers (1963), which was apparently quite popular with high-end critics, he compares the film to 2001 as an "exercise in directorial self-indulgence. It is, in many ways, an exercise in idiocy. Life is too short. To be bored for even seventy-nine minutes is too long. I await the thunk of poison-tipped arrows." 

Other movies got his poison pen: "a village idiot of a movie," or "the cinematic equivalent of Hitler's Russian campaign." 

I highlighted his analysis of why some (most?) of the movies made from Stephen King novels are terrible. Certainly they were in the time he was writing the column, before movies like The Green Mile or The Shawshank Redemption began to change the reading public's view of King's work. I have often written that King's work is best understood as about one thing on top and something else underneath, which Harlan said much more clearly:

[Carrie] was the essence of the secret of Stephen King's phenomenal success: the everyday experience raised to the mythic level by the application of fantasy to a potent cultural trope. It was Jungian archetype goosed with ten million volts of emotional power. It was the commonly-shared horrible memory of half the population, reinterpreted. It was the flash of recognition, the miracle of that rare instant in which readers dulled by years of reading artful lies felt their skin stretched tight by an encounter with artful truth.

I hope one day I can write a review that well.

Despite the poison pen for movies he considered too stupid - which discounts 90 percent of the dreck in the cineplex - his fondness for the art form of cinema shines through (and uses his own singular feature film, The Oscar, as an example of the worst of the lot). 

Let us speak of guilty pleasures, and of outre nights at the cinema. Of windows nailed shut in the soul, and of dreadful dreams we would pay never to have again. Of winds that blow out of our skulls, carrying with them the sounds of sparrows singing in the eaves of madhouses. Of chocolate decadence, sleek limbs, cheap adventure novels, people we ought not to have anything to do with, and the reflection off the blade.

What was he writing about? Does it matter? Okay, it matters a little, and it's an interesting discussion of whether violence in film and television encourages or inspires violence in real life, which is a different column.

But the language, the voice, the attention to the words as Neil Gaiman once said of him... "You hear them in your head, and they sing."

 

BookGeek: The Last Policeman

I am officially very late to the party, if that party is the end of the world. 

I tripped over The Last Policeman because Amazon recommended it to me and I needed a break from the endless creative nonfiction I've been reading over the semester. Published in 2012, it is a science fiction mystery (not quite a noir) by Ben H. Winters, and it is the first in a trilogy, winning the 2012 Edgar Award. 

On the surface of it, The Last Policeman is a straightforward whodunit, with a fledgling detective assigned to a death investigation that everyone else is convinced is a suicide, but there is something about it that just bothers him. As he dives into the dead man's life, he begins to suspect there is much more going on here, etc. 

Yes, it's your basic mystery plot. But here's the twist: All this is happening during the six months before a giant planet-killer asteroid strikes Earth. The worldbuilding is fascinating, imagining the political, economic, social and psychological impact on a near- future U.S. in which the end of the world is certain. Some people opt for their "bucket list," as there is no future for which to plan. Some people opt out, as suicides skyrocket. 

And some solve crimes, even though the police are just going through the motions at this point. 

I found it oddly compelling, even though the mystery itself was rather lackluster (I had the killer pegged way out). Most of the critics seemed to agree that it is the vision of a pre-apocalyptic world that draws the attention here, and for that Winters did extensive research. He also chose to set it in Concord, N.H. rather than the done-to-death New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago. It's fun to read pieces that really develop a sense of place, especially when it isn't the same three cities we've destroyed over and over again in science fiction.

I can recommend The Last Policeman without reserve, and will be picking up the sequels as soon as I finish the Murderbots....

 

 

IT finishes with a strong bite

Warning: There may be spoilers for book and movie(s) ahead.)

It's hard to objectively review IT: Chapter Two, considering that it is drawn from my favorite novel of all time. So buckle in, folks, this is going to be long.

I've always maintained that Stephen King's novels are best examined as a surface bugadeboo with something entirely other underneath. The Shining is his treatise on alcoholism and domestic violence, with a haunted hotel on the surface. Cujo is about unhappy marriage, from the seven-year itch to loveless abuse, with a rabid St. Bernard on the surface. Pet Sematary is about how we face death in American society (or don't), Under the Dome was his criticism of the Bush II administration, The Dead Zone questioned whether a political assassin could ever be right, Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game explored the impact of child sexual abuse, and The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption found dignity and even God behind prison bars.

None of it has to do with monsters, unless they are the monsters who walk among us.

IT is my favorite novel because when I read it, my mental vision takes me to the streets of Westfield, Mass. I lived there from ages seven to fourteen, so it is the place where childhood lives for me. That's about where the resemblance between Derry and Westfield stops, as it was a lovely town despite junior high, and as far as I know there were no shapechanging killer clowns. 

Most people dismiss IT as the story of Pennywise, but like the rest of King's work, its inner story is something very different. It's about imagination, the rich and lustrous flavor of a child's imaginings that dim to a dull glow when they grow up. That's why the children were so strong when they faced It in 1955, and why their diminished numbers were able to defeat It in 1985.

The movies dispense with those themes for the most part, focusing a bit more on childhood friendship than imagination. Much was made of the changes made to the characters' backstories beyond the simple update to 1989. The hints of incestuous abuse from Bev's father are made explicit, and then added to poor Eddie and his mother (of which there is no hint in the book). Stan's backstory was filled out with more interesting creatures; I approved of making his father the town rabbi in what has to be the whitest, goyest town in Maine, but having Rabbi Dad be cold and dismissive feels unfair. Movies always try to amp things up, of course, but does everyone have to have terrible parents?

Which brings me to Mike Hanlon, one of the best characters in the book and the one served worst by Chapter 1. Book Mike had a stable, happy home life. He had parents who loved each other and loved him, who raised him well and paid attention to him, who cheered his successes and taught him how to survive the racism of their neighbors and the world beyond. They fought the battle so many working-class black families had to fight (and still do), and they did it with dignity and grace. Mike is the wonderful person that he is - bright, studious, curious, empathic - because of his parents.

Um, never mind. Because in Chapter 1, we find that instead Mike's parents died in a fire, and he's raised by an awful, abusive grandfather who imparts none of these qualities on him, forcing him to kill animals against his gentle nature. I spent whole portions of Chapter 1 with my jaw hanging open - why do this? Why replace the Hanlons with this horrible caricature of the too-strict black grandparent? And why take Mike's curious investigation of Derry history and give it to Ben, who already has his own skills and intricate backstory to contribute? It took Mike, a driving character behind the Loser's Club in the novel, and made him essentially background noise to the story of Chapter 1.

So I approached Chapter 2 with cautious optimism. That became foreboding when I read news stories alleging that Mike was to be degraded even further in the second half: Instead of being the town librarian who has carefully researched and interviewed the city's history to record the impact of Pennywise, Mike was to be a drug addict turning to heroin to deal with the traumas of fighting It. So it was stated in plain English by director Andy Muschietti after Chapter 1 came out.

Nice try, Master Director, but all the kids fought It and Bev in particular went floating in the deadlights. None of them turn to drugs, even though it would make sense, especially for Richie. The only one to fall into addiction is the black guy? Nice. 

Fortunately, it seems that idea hit the cutting room floor. You can see its echoes, however. Isaiah Mustafa does an exceptional job with what must have been one of the hardest acting gigs ever: to begin filming under one premise of the character, and then have it yanked out from under you. In several scenes, especially earlier in the film, Mustafa appears to play Mike as high, speaking very quickly and falling all over his words. The movie attempts to pass it off as fear, but I read the interviews and I know where the script began. Any hint that Mike is an addict has been cut, and instead he just comes across as terrified (and living in the attic above the library for no clear reason specified). 

So I give Muschietti props for listening to the screaming and coming to his realizations late. Did he change it because he realized it was a horrifically racist thing to write, or because he figured there would be protests overshadowing his movie? Only he knows for sure.

(Also, I have heard zero buzz about this plot development silently disappearing from the final cut of the film. Am I the only one who remembers?)

The only shadow remaining is when Pennywise is tormenting Mike late in the film, and shows him a headline accusing Mike's dead parents of being crackheads who burned themselves to death; in the final moments, we see the real headline, and they are simply local residents, not addicts at all. We know Pennywise uses psychological torment as well as physical threats to horrify his victims; with the clumsy edits, the headlines no longer make any sense at all. Likewise Pennywise taunts Mike with "I know your secret.... you're a madman." Well, no, he isn't. There are multiple problems with Mike, as has been widely discussed, but he's not crazy. It's a huge "huh?" moment during the final battle, and clearly it started with the now-excised drug abuse. 

But I can't complain, because Mike is the driving force of the story as he takes over Chapter 2 - almost to a greater extent than the book. It's quite clear on the written page that while Mike brings them all back together again and brings them up to speed, he then cedes the reins to Bill, who had been their leader in childhood. This doesn't really happen in Chapter 2, as Bill is distracted again and again by Pennywise and attempts to go off alone - Mike must stay in charge because Bill never takes up his role as leader, which means Mike also bears the responsibility for the possible outcomes. 

Other stories get short shrift: while I don't think we needed to meet Ben's bartender in Nebraska or Richie's angry manager, I feel cheated by the ninety seconds we see of Bev's husband, Tom. That story is much more detailed in the book and deserved to be there, as it was more than just "Bev married a dick like her father." That's too simplistic for what Book-Tom means for Bev and for the Losers. He beats the snot out of her, and she barely escapes with the help of a friend (also missing in action) who then pays drastically for her loyalty. Tom shows up in Derry, as does Bill's wife Audra, and they have a part to play in the fight against Pennywise.

Tom is the living embodiment of the Losers' Club's failure to escape their past, the walking example of all that was awful in their childhood and that they willingly kept - the damage Pennywise inflicted. For him to hit Bev a few times and she runs out the door does the story a disservice, as well as paying little attention to the psychological impact of domestic abuse.

But CultureGeek, the movie is already 17 years long!

Yes, it's a long, long, long movie. So I would have been happier with about 20 fewer minutes of Cthulu as imagined by Sam Raimi and replace them with actual character development. We don't spend a whole lot of time with Pennywise the Clown this round, as he's very busy turning into CGI tentacles and letting his variant other forms torment the Losers. I've never been all that fond of entrails and gross-out horror, so I can't say that Pennywise in his various forms scared me nearly as much as the old woman in Bev's childhood apartment. (Until she turned into Raimiesque CGI, mind you. She was hella scarier as a human.)

As I said when Chapter 1 came out: Bill Skarsgaard is not responsible for my complete lack of fear at Pennywise. It's not his fault. He did a fine job as envisioned... but that character design. It's the Bugs Bunny buck teeth and funky costume. I simply could not find him scary, not with the voice to match those goofy teeth. (The CGI teeth are another story.) Maybe it's because I saw the Tim Curry edition in 1990 and slept with the light on for a few nights. But the goofy face simply doesn't work for me. Curry needed no CGI to scare the bejesus out of me or my high school classmates, who carefully stepped around the stormdrains outside our school for a few days as the miniseries was running. Just in case. 

If anything, Pennywise is less scary in this modern version, because the few times we do see It as the clown, It is attempting to lure a small child by guilting her into playing with him (a theme it repeats several times) or popping up in cheap jump scares. I can't be scared of the sobbing passive-aggressive Pennywise, folks.

The one moment where Pennywise is truly scary is in the inspired mirror maze sequence, which apparently was dreamed up by James McAvoy (Bill) and Muschietti. I will live with Bill refusing to take up his mantle of leadership because McAvoy simply knocks that scene out of the park. 

The changes that are bringing the most chatter post-release involve Richie and Eddie. I feel that Eddie fares almost as poorly as Mike in the changes to his character, both as a child and as a man. Eddie is portrayed as being an angry, hard-cursing germophobe. They got one part right. But Eddie's talent that contributed to the group was his unerring ability to navigate in any situation - it is the "compass in his head" that helps them to survive the sewers. Beyond that he was gentle and shy, and Richie's best friend. Where did this perpetually angry man come from? He's so fiercely unlikable that we find ourselves wishing Pennywise would eat him and put him out of our misery.

Likewise Book-Richie was a smartass, the ADHD wisecracker whose mouth always got him into trouble. In the 1990 miniseries, they could not have chosen a better pairing of an exceedingly young Seth Green and the late great Harry Anderson to play Richie, and they did it perfectly. Anderson in particular ad-libbed a lot of his puns and wisecracks, and you got the real sense that he and Eddie were friends despite his jibes.

This movie's variation never stops to let Eddie and Richie actually be friends, or anything more. As children and as adults, Richie comes off like a jerk, saying mean, foul things to Eddie and Eddie returns with actual anger bordering on fury. It's hard to buy these people as the best of friends when they spend the entire movie being angry with each other. (And why, exactly, was Eddie's profession changed to a corporate raider who screams at traffic, instead of the limo service owner who can easily navigate in and out of Boston traffic, which is a supernatural feat in and of itself?)  

Then, of course, there is Richie's secret.

There's no hint in the book that Richie is gay. In fact, he's quite decidedly not, and the 1990 miniseries doubles down and gives him a string of ex-wives. Eddie likewise has married, though he basically married Mom (and cute trick by having the same actress play Eddie's mom in the past and his wife in the present, but they lost all the points with repeated fat jokes, because we all know about fat women, amirite? Ugh). 

I have often argued that movies have to stand separate from the source material, which is why "but in the comics..." will get you thrown out of my proverbial bar when we're talking superhero movies. And I really think it could have been an interesting twist to see Richie secretly gay... if it made any sense at all for him to be so deep in the closet in 2019. That actually would have been more comprehensible in the original 1985 novel or 1990 TV-movie, or if Richie had been in any other profession than show businesses. Really, "actor/comedian comes out as gay" would barely rate a squib in Entertainment Weekly, and so the movie fails to give us any kind of grounding or reasonable backstory for why this secret has a Capital S in Richie's life.

(Or why he treats the apparently object of his affections so abominably.)

This is a movie that opened with a gay-bashing murder, and it's as horrifying and awful to see as it is in the book. King wrote it based on a real gay-bashing murder in his area in the 1980s, and there has been much buzz about it. The book makes it clear that Derry is more viciously homophobic than most towns around it, tacitly blaming Pennywise's influence. But the movie barely connects that atmosphere with Richie - and nor should it, since Richie wouldn't care one iota what the people in his former hometown think of his orientation. Rani Baker goes into much greater detail on this than I can, since this review is already as long as the book and has taken an extra week to write, but suffice to say this whole subplot could have been done much, much better.

And yet it was lovely to visit my creepy not-hometown of Derry again, and when I could shut up my inner editor desperately clutching the 1004-page book to my chest, I enjoyed it. Stephen King's cameo had me rolling, there's a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo from the original Young Ben from 1990, there are several other nods to the book, the miniseries and other King stories, and even a turtle nod. 

But I needed less Clownthulu and more psychological torment, less confused half-editing and more friendship among my heroes. I wanted the history of Derry and the subtle ways Pennywise infused himself into the town, and really, would it have killed them to roll the Standpipe? It's just pixels.

I enjoyed it. But I'm not sure I'll be watching it over and over again, as I have the 1990 miniseries with Tim Curry and his merry band. We all still float down here. 

Guest Voices: Writing in a Shared World

Ever wonder what it's like to write a book in a shared universe, like Marvel or Star Wars? Novelist Sela Carsen shares her experience.

 

Writing is a solitary endeavour, by necessity. If you’re talking, if you’re chatting, if you’re engaging with other people, you’re not getting words down on your manuscript. And if you want to put out a finished book, that’s what counts -- getting the words down.

But there are instances where working with others provides a framework for something bigger than just your own story. One of those instances is taking part in a shared world.

There are a few ways that shared worlds work. This is one of the most common: You’re invited to participate in a world that someone else has already built and populated with their own characters. You can’t change things about the canon, but you can work inside it to your own tune, as long as you don’t mess with established storylines. Think of the many Star Trek novels here.

I did this with the Nocturne Falls universe, run by Kristen Painter. In order to meet the demands of her ravenous readers, she invited about a dozen authors to write in the cozy, sweet, paranormal, small-town world she’d built. The rules were limited:

1. Set it in the town. We could build new places, but they needed to fit logically with the rest of the setting.
2. We could connect with the canon characters, but not change their storylines (i.e. we couldn’t decide we didn’t like the relationship that had already been written, and write in our own hero or heroine instead).
3. And we had to stick with the tone of the stories -- no gory violence, no swearing, no sex on the page. Actually, that wasn’t so much a rule as a guideline, and it was more about appealing to the readers who already loved the original stories. They were “clean” romances (yeah, no one actually likes that word, but it’s the keyword that readers know) so if we wanted to tap into her readership, that’s what they wanted.

The rest was up to us! People wrote cozy mysteries and young adult and straight PNR and the readers loved it! She ran the project for two years, and her readers ended up with more than 30 new Nocturne Falls stories, in e-book, in print, and even in audio.

There’s a call out right now for a shared world based on a contemporary romance series that’s already out. The call actually states “The … World is comprised of original works of fiction written about the … series characters and/or in the story settings. Writers may maintain the original authors' characters and settings or add their own.”

I’ve asked whether that means authors can take those original characters and change the canon stories from the series to include a different hero or heroine, but I don’t know the answer yet. The world is also accepting stories written in different romance subgenres, including historical, paranormal, and mystery.

Another approach might be: a physical world is established as a framework, and authors can write whatever they want inside that world as long as it doesn’t break the physical rules or the overall concept. Maybe it’s a town, maybe it’s a motorcycle club, maybe it’s a sci-fi galaxy.

This is the kind of world that often works well for a “band of brothers” series and storyline. Decide on the basic rules for the group, and if there’s an overarching storyline that everyone needs to touch on, then let ‘em run.

It also works for broader strokes. I’m currently working on a brand new sci-fi romance series set in a galaxy called the Obsidian Rim. It started with two authors who came up with the historical background of the post-apocalyptic galaxy, the new geography of the “Salty Way” and the physics by which humans can travel there.

There are about eight of us involved now and the closer we get to the first set of release dates, the more interesting the details become. We don’t have to use each other’s worlds as touchpoints, but we knew up front that being able to reference other stories in the series was something that readers would enjoy. If they read about another author’s planet or characters in my story, they’ll seek out those books. And if another author has her characters visit Gizem Station (my world), then readers may find it intriguing enough to look for my books.

As a variation, I encountered one shared world (a magical university/older kids Hogwarts sort of thing) where the authors were ALL up in each other’s stories. The entire concept was to so tightly entwine the stories and characters that readers would need to read the series in its entirety to see the whole world and how all the pieces came together.

Any way that people decide to come together to build a world can work as long as everyone is clear on the rules beforehand. But no matter what the world is, you still have to do your own writing!

 

Sela Carsen is an award-winning author of paranormal and sci-fi romance — with or without sex and dead bodies. Your pick. She maintains a permanent nerd-on for fairytales and mythology, and openly hoards reference books about obscure folklore. Born a wanderer, she and her family have finally settled in the Midwest. Until they move again, at least. Find out more at http://selacarsen.com

Guest Voices: The Love That Hears Its Name Whispered, With Laughter

(Note: As they sometimes say on NPR, the following is by no means explicit but does acknowledge the existence of sex.)

I had a great idea for this entry. I was going to talk about the way pop culture, from movies to TV shows to popular music to comic books and more, has a gender disparity in the way masturbation is portrayed depending on whether the person engaged in the act is male or female. It could be summed up in what the activity suggested about the person as a social animal: If the character is a female, this is an empowering act that shows “she doesn’t need a man” to have a satisfying sexual life, but if it the character is a male, the act is humiliating proof that he “can’t find a woman.”

(Apologies for the heteronormativity and gender binary-ness of it all.)

The thesis fits the pop culture I’m most familiar with. And therein lies the flaw at the heart of the experiment: a pitifully small sample size, even though some people think of me as a walking encyclopedia.

Thankfully, you and I have been rescued from a likely embarrassing outcome by someone else with the time and resources to actually do the research correctly: Australian academic Lauren Rosewarne’s Masturbation in Pop Culture: Screen, Society, Self (Lexington Books, 2014) is a soundly researched look at the phenomenon using more than 600 instances as its evidence base.

And now I will say a novel thing you never hear online: I was wrong.

To the extent that masturbation is talked about, it’s often in the sense of an “everyone does it, but we don’t talk about it” talk from parent to child. But the “caught in the act” scenario applies to men and women, the “sad and lonely and looking for release” depiction goes both ways, and there are even examples like Michael Winterbottom’s NC-17 indie film 9 Songs where not only is the character involved with someone, they might even be in the same bed.

Rosewarne’s book is a fascinating read, though it’s priced as a college textbook, so reader be rich (sic). So instead of going off on a bunch of anecdotes — which would not constitute data — I’ll instead leave you with one anecdote and a recommendation, not in that order.

* The Recommendation: Chynna Clugston-Flores’ indie comic Blue Monday (available in collected editions from Image Comics) is a must-read for anyone who likes post-punk and New Wave music, manga aesthetics, and the high school comedies of John Hughes and his imitators, or preferably all of the above. But John Hughes is now problematic, I know, so I’ll add that those problems are not on evidence here.

 Volume 4 of the series, Painted Moon, has a riotous sequence in which the core group of friends discovers that two of their own have never learned to manage their tensions, so to speak, and peer-pressure them into (separately) getting in touch with themselves. Queue up the Buzzcocks’ punk classic “Orgasm Addict” as hijinks ensue and Bleu, our aquamarine-tressed heroine, suddenly starts getting a lot of bathroom passes.

The whole series is a delight, but this installment of the series turned the “horny boy/shameful girl” stereotype on its ear to hilarious effect.

* The Anecdote: I don’t know why I didn’t know until … more recently than I care to admit … that Cyndi Lauper’s hit single “She Bop” was an empowering anthem about masturbation, but I’m absolutely positive that neither of the junior high teachers who used the song for a unit on verb conjugation knew anything about that, even though the song was one of the reasons records eventually got labeled. (Cyndi Lauper, Guns ’n Roses, Sam Kinison, 2 Live Crew, they were all alike, right?)

In the same way that Bleu Finnegan or Drew Braverman of TV’s “Parenthood” may have loved themselves a little too much and too often, that song was bored into my brain as we tortured the rhyme scheme with such verb tenses as “they shall have bopped.”

(The voice of Cyndi Lauper was also present for a more poignant and strange moment in my high school years when I was picked to play the color Green in a teacher inservice about a possibly pseudoscientific personality model called “True Colors.”

I love Cyndi Lauper now because I am not history’s greatest monster, and I hope she got some royalties for those bits of strangeness. But 30 years after its release, if I hear “She Bop” coming on the radio, I’m still changing the station.

Jason Tippitt is a recovering seminarian and mostly recovered former journalist living a few miles beyond that place you stop to use the restroom off Interstate 40 between Nashville and Memphis.

BookGeek: The Prince of Tides

It qualifies as being the last one on the bus, but then I never promised CultureGeek reviews would be focused solely on new releases. Far from it; we can learn and enjoy just as much from a 30-year-old novel as from one released yesterday.

So when I tell you that The Prince of Tides is an amazing novel, with the kind of writing that I wish I were capable of producing, it is not hyperbole. It’s a wonderful discovery, just a little late.

I saw the movie back in the 1990s, and was fascinated by some of the best acting that either Barbra Streisand or Nick Nolte had produced. It had a strange juxtaposition of New York introspection and Southern gothic that I had never seen before. And, of course, it had one awful, brutal scene that I never forgot, hand pressed to mouth in horror.

Then friend and fellow author John Hartness posted on Facebook that he thought Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides had writing that made him want to become a writer. It struck me that I had picked up an old mass-market paperback of the book at a used-book sale somewhere and I should give it a shot. So really, this is all John's fault.

My paperback has a horrible cheesy romance-novel cover, and if you know anything about the book or the movie, you know it is not a romance. There is love, and a love story at multiple levels. But it is absolutely not a romance.

 

It was my mother who taught me the southern way of the spirit in its most delicate and intimate forms. My mother believed in the dreams of flowers and animals. Before we went to bed at night as small children, she would reveal to us in her storytelling voice that salmon dreamed of mountain passes and the brown faces of grizzlies hovering over clear rapids. Copperheads, she would say, dreamed of placing their fangs in the shinbones of hunters. Ospreys slept with their feathered, plummeting dreamselves screaming through deep, slow-motion dives toward herring. There were the brute wings of owls in the nightmares of ermine, the downwind approach of timber wolves in the night stillness of elk.

But we never knew about her dreams, for my mother kept us strangers to her own interior life. We knew that bees dreamed of roses, that roses dreamed of the pale hands of florists, that spiders dreamed of luna moths adhered to silver webs. As her children, we were the trustees of her dazzling evensons of the imagination, but did not know that mothers dreamed.

 

That’s just part of the first page.

The story itself is southern gothic at its finest, with horrors and ignorance and racism and “bless your heart” backstabbing in between the love of the land and the glories of the life and history. But at its heart, it’s the story of a man who is lost between a troubled childhood, a faltering marriage, a dysfunctional family wracked with mental illness and tragedy, and the awful beauty of loving two women at the same time.

I no longer have time in my crazy schedule to stick with every book I read, now that I am in grad school. Some books I have picked up I hated, and discarded without a second thought. Others I despised but carried through, if only because I hoped the ending would wash away its awfulness. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t. That one is going back in the donation box.) Instead, I find I am seeking out more and more reading to evaluate craft and style and language, perhaps in the hopes of taking my work to the next level.

Conroy’s writing is conversational but also dense with description. He paints pictures with words far more elaborate and beautiful (or awful) than the penny-ante art on the cover of my paperback. You don’t skim it the way you might more conventional genre novels. In part it’s a mystery: what happened to Tom Wingo’s brilliant, troubled sister Samantha, that would spur her to attempt to take her own life? What happened to all of them to tear the family apart so?

There are no villains here - well, almost none. The father looms large as abusive, cruel, ignorant and a force of terror in his children’s lives… and yet it almost redeems him, as a man who loved his family and could not imagine why the world in which he was raised had changed and his tyranny would no longer be absolved.

Tom himself is not always a reliable narrator, telling his family’s story to us and to a New York psychiatrist as separate from his world as she could be - but she has her own sadness, and her own story, even as she enters the world of the Wingo family.

Oddly, once I finished the novel, I felt that the movie did not quite do it justice. The character of Tom’s brother Luke was barely apparent in the movie, which chose to focus far more on the moment of horror and Tom’s romances. Yet he is a driving force in the novel, and Luke’s life story is as much a part of the family’s trauma as that awful night so gruesomely depicted. (Other omissions make more sense. One word: tiger.) The movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards; I do not know what (if any) awards the novel won, but it deserved them.

I found it fascinating, even though it was far afield from my usual reading. After all, there are no zombies or ghosts rising from the South Carolina swamp to torment the Wingo family. If there are horrors in The Prince of Tides, they are solely human-made. And sometimes those are the worst of all.

Guest Voices: I Ship That

By Sela Carsen

 

I ship for a living.

I ship Sherlolly. I ship Johnlock. I ship Stucky, and Black Widow with Hawkeye even though it’s totally not canon. I ship Batman with Catwoman, but not with Wonder Woman because I ship Superman and Wonder Woman.

Why should I care about these completely imaginary couples? Because I’m a romance writer and it’s my job to ship people.

Romance, despite all claims of being “forumlaic,” only has two basic rules.

• The love story is central to the plot, and
• it has an emotionally satisfying and uplifting ending.

If you write (1), but not (2), then you have a love story, but not a romance. If you write (2), but not (1) you have pretty much anything else that might have a romantic subplot, but it’s not a romance. If you write neither (1) nor (2), then you’re probably writing literary fiction and nobody has time for that kind of negativity in their lives. (Kidding. Kind of.)

But aside from those two elements, absolutely everything else is open. Want to write the undead in Victorian England? Bec McMaster’s London Steampunk series. Want to write cyborg shapeshifters in space? Naomi Lucas’ Cyborg Shifters series. Want to write stories set in a quirky tourist town run by vampires? Kristen Painter’s Nocturne Falls series.

They can be lighthearted and fun, or they can be dark and taboo, or they can be heartwrenching and complex. The three basic categories of romance -- historical, contemporary, and paranormal -- encompass virtually any kind of story that can be told, from military thrillers and detailed historicals to sci-fi and fantasy with world building to rival Neil Gaiman or C.J. Cherryh. Romance is the only genre that crosses over with nearly every other genre, giving it a breadth and depth that can appeal to all readers.

The only thing that romance, like any other story, has to do is tell readers a story that lifts them out of the mire of chaos that makes their everyday lives so stressful. That’s the same reason people read anything, really -- mystery, horror, graphic novels, whatever. The reader who finds joy in Frank Miller or Dan Brown or N.K. Jemisin is looking for the same kind of satisfaction as the reader who reads the latest Nora Roberts.

It’s my job to ship characters who go through all kinds of obstacles to be together, whether it’s something as simple as an overworked single mom and a mechanic, or a lady-in-waiting and a vampire. Love can be found anywhere. And I totally ship that.

 

 

Sela Carsen is an award-winning author of paranormal and sci-fi romance — with or without sex and dead bodies. Your pick. She maintains a permanent nerd-on for fairytales and mythology, and openly hoards reference books about obscure folklore. Born a wanderer, she and her family have finally settled in the Midwest. Until they move again, at least. Find out more at http://selacarsen.com

 

 

Linkspam doesn't want to float, thanks

I’m struggling to maintain enthusiasm for the new IT, which is depressing since it’s my favorite book of all time.

Look, the kids did all right, and while I thought it was goofy to put them in the 1980s, it had an okay Stranger Things vibe that I appreciated somewhat. And some of the changes were all right: I liked adding the painting to Stanley’s backstory and his struggles with the Torah; making Bev’s father’s creeper vibe stronger was risky but it worked (unlike adding the same vibe to Eddie’s mom, which didn’t).

Sadly, Pennywise himself just doesn’t scare me. It’s the teeth. Granted, no one could really live up to Tim Curry’s darkly gleeful Pennywise of 1990, but the new Pennywise could have been creepy… if they hadn’t given him Bugs Bunny teeth. Each time he waves at the kids, I expect to hear, “Wascally wabbit.”

But what they did to Mike Hanlon’s character was unforgivable. He has no role in the Losers Club now, since the historian job shifted to Ben. Taking away the wonderful characters of his parents and replacing them with a horrible stereotype of the abusive black grandparent was simply wrong.

Now they’re doubling down and making Mike the adult a drug addict? Is there a Big Book of Hollywood Stereotypes they want to check off? Mike Hanlon grew up to be head librarian, a respected friendly bachelor uncle type with a passion for local history. Why oh why must they remove everything positive about his character? To be “edgy”? He was the one Loser who actually made it through without screwing his life all to hell. No, by all means, let’s make the black guy a drug addict! Clue bat requested for the writer’s room.

Never mind all that; we have a cast now. I have no real objections in casting, and am actually looking forward to James McAvoy as Bill Denbrough. Hopefully the actors can overcome whatever madness they’re doing with the script.

• It’s been a fortnight of bad news before I even get to finish Handmaid’s Tale season two, so I’m actually happy to see that Roseanne will be returning without Roseanne.

Resurrected as The Connors, the show will follow John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf and Sara GIlbert among others, hopefully focusing on the real lives of blue-collar Americans in this weird wild world we built since the original show of the 1980s-90s. Given Roseanne Barr’s cataclysmic explosion and subsequent firing, I am pleased to be given a reason to see these issues actually explored (and hopefully in a humorous way).

For my money: they’re gonna kill her off. And that actually could be interesting, watching these characters we know so well redefining themselves without the woman around whom their world centered, for better or worse. If nothing else, it should give John Goodman some great acting moments, and I personally believe him to be one of the greater unsung actors of our era.

• Scribblers! The St. Louis Writer’s Guild has launched 1764, a literary journal named after the year the city was founded. Submissions are open May 1 to July 31 for annual inclusion; micropay for poetry, flash fiction, essays, short stories and illustrations. Find out more here.

• I lost an entire dinner break to Cover Snark, a feature on Smart Bitches Trashy Books. No cheesy, poorly-designed romance cover is safe from their vicious pens.

• Octavia Butler’s Dawn will be adapted for the small screen by director Ava DuVernay of Selma fame. Dawn was published in 1987 and kicked off the Xenogenesis trilogy, later collected in Lilith’s Brood. DuVernay is creating the series but has not signed it yet with a streaming service. Given her skillful work on A Wrinkle in Time, I think she’ll do just fine. Sadly, it was announced last summer (I missed it) and we haven’t heard much more since then. Here’s hoping it hasn’t fallen into developmental hell. If you haven’t read Butler (as sadly I haven’t, but plan to), here’s a good analysis and overview of her work. Butler died in 2006.

• This Week in Sexual Harassment News: Terry Crews testifies before the U.S. Senate that he was harassed at a party by a male agent, and once he started speaking out, he was yanked off Expendables 4 after co-starring in the first three. Apparently he was told to drop his lawsuit against the agent, Adam Venit, or he would not be in the film. He stuck to his guns, so to speak. Venit, by the way, is Sylvester Stallone’s agent. Click the link and scan down to the part where he explains why he, a fairly large and muscular man, didn’t fight back. And then remember how many women get that question, and how no one believes them when they give the same answer: you can’t.

And if you thought Pixar was exempt (at least until you heard about John Lasseter)… I have bad news for you. It wasn't just Lasseter.

• A moment of silence for the Jerry Springer Show, inexplicably still running after 27 years and finally canceled, putting it out of our misery. Thus ends its long-running fiction - no, it was never real!

• The latest edition to the upcoming Watchmen show: Jeremy Irons. They aren’t doing a reproduction or reboot of the original graphic novel (they could only do a better job than Zach Snyder) but exploring the universe further.

• Eeek. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, because when you think about a fictionalization of the Manson Family and Tate murders, you naturally think Quentin Tarantino. But because he’s Tarantino, he’s got an amazing cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Al pacino, Margot Robbie, Burt Reynolds, Dakota Fanning, Damian Lewis… and it opens on the 50th anniversary of the Manson-LaBianca murders.

• Locals: Shakespeare in the Park has wrapped. I wish I could say you missed a lot, but for the first time in many years, I was disappointed. The direction just felt off to me - maybe it was Romeo, who simply didn’t sell his character’s passion, or maybe it was in the attempts to make Romeo and Juliet more accessible to a younger audience. The initial contact during the dance played like lightweight flirting with no feeling behind it just didn’t fly for me. It was visually lovely, and Juliet was fairly strong with extra credit to Lord Capulet. But for my money, you’ll get a more emotionally resonant experience from the Baz Luhrmann film, with all its frenetic late-90s weirdness. Let me put it this way: I felt more emotional impact from Paris’ mourning of Juliet than Romeo’s, and that simply should not happen.

 

RIP

• Joe Jackson, 89, best known as the patriarch of the Jackson Five family, father to Michael and Janet (and nine others). He negotiated the kids’ first deals, and he also had a heavy hand with them, according to the kids. He died of pancreatic cancer Wednesday.

 

Trailer Park

• Predator, not to be confused with Predator or Predators, has a new trailer out with plenty of dark shadows and violence.

• Miami Love Affair, starring Burt Reynolds as an extravagant art dealer.

 

Coming This Weekend

• Sicario: Day of the Soldado. Maybe it’s just me, but I have zero desire to see this movie about a killer who suddenly develops a soft spot for a little girl.

• Uncle Drew, the basketball movie about the old-timer squad including Kyrie Irving, Shaquille O’Neal, etc.

• Sanju, a subtitled Hindi film about actor Sanjay Dutt miraculously in wide release in the U.S.

 

Continuing:

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom; Incredibles 2; Ocean’s 8; Deadpool 2; Tag; Superfly; Solo: A Star Wars Story.

 

Happy Independence Day!

CultureGeek ventures near the Murder House

Oh, American Horror Story. I’ve quit you. And then you do this.

Next season will be a crossover between Murder House and Coven, which were two seasons I actually managed to watch. Look, I stuck with it a long ways, but my taste for horror is of the creepy, chilling Twilight Zone variety, not “let’s count the ways we can rape” and eyeball-gouging with grapefruit spoons.

So AHS is trying to go back to its roots after last year’s politically-themed Cult dropped down from Roanoake’s levels set in 2016. Hilariously, the lowest-ranked premiere was the first season for Murder House in 2012, before anyone had the slightest idea what the hell American Horror Story was about.

I might be dragged kicking and screaming to try yet another season. But I’m honestly losing my patience with shows that only seem to exist in order to drag me from gory death to gory death (Walking Dead, I'm looking at you). 

• Locals: The 18th annual Whitaker St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase will screen 20 films at Washington University on July 13-15 and 20-22, hosted by nonprofit Cinema St. Louis. Closing night awards will be presented at a free celebration at Blueberry Hill. Showcawe films will be chosen for inclusion in the St. Louis International Film Festival. Tickets are $13; $10 for students and Cinema St. Louis members and can be purchased at brownpapertickets.com.

• Uncancelled! Lucifer has been picked up by Netflix for a fourth season after it was cancelled by (wait for it) Fox. This comes after Brooklyn Nine-Nine was rescued by NBC after it was cancelled by… Fox. Not so lucky: Designated Survivor got the ax from not-Fox (NBC) and Netflix was thinking about it, but so far nothing.

• If you can bear it, scan through Newsweek’s recounting of the 50 best-selling singles in U.S. history, and the oldest one is from 1997. Oh, my youth hurts.

• Locals: SIUE’s Beauty and the Beast opens tonight and runs through June 24. I am in no way objective; it’s my son’s collegiate theatrical debut and he was co-designer on the project, helping to build and design the sets and some of the special effects. So if you go, watch for the Lonely Villager/Wolf/Spoon, and enjoy the show!

• This Week in Sexual Harassment: Not long after Star Wars actresses Daisy Ridley and Kelly Marie Tran left Instagram due to constant harassment and abuse, 14-year-old Millie Bobby Brown of Stranger Things has left Twitter. It seems some idiot Photoshopped her into awful homophobic memes with a hashtag #TakeDownMillieBobbyBrown, which just goes to show that the internet is entirely populated with cretins. She’s fourteen, you dipshits.

Also, follow this Twitter thread from Anne Wheaton on the horrific harassment she endured at BookExpo America, where apparently an attractive female writer cannot be taken seriously unless she’s willing to sleep with middle-aged buyers.

• Cue the fanwank! A released photo from Wonder Woman 2 appears to show a confused Steve Trevor in 1984, the setting for the sequel. Did Steve somehow survive the cataclysm of Wonder Woman’s finale? Is it Steve’s great-grandson, like in the comics? (Which is kinda squicky, but remember Captain America and Carter’s great-granddaughter? On second thought, don’t.) If it’s Steve, how come Diana still seems to be mourning him into the 21st century? Though I rather like the idea that this time, it's Steve who's the fish out of the cultural water. Filming has begun with Kristen Wiig as Cheetah and - we hope - a cameo for Lynda Carter.

• Ordinarily I’d be really happy that Ewan McGregor will play Danny Torrance in Doctor Sleep, based on Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining. Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed in Doctor Sleep, which had an uneven plot structure and serious retcons - if you’re going to do a sequel or prequel, continuity is king. Still, Danny has had some serious demons to fight all these years, and McGregor has the ability to … shine in the role. (Hee.)

• Happy 81st birthday to my family’s namesake, Donald Duck! I do a fair Donald-quack, but it doesn’t translate well in print. So here’s a picture instead.

 

 

• Tony Awards went to The Band’s Visit, Laurie Metcalf of Edwardsville for Three Tall Women, and several other people who weren’t in Mean Girls. Details here.

• There will not be a Defenders Season 2. I’m not sure if I’m happy or sad about this; I was fairly neutral on Defenders and thought it could have been a lot of fun if not for the storyline drawn from Iron Fist, which we all hated. Oh well, at least we’ll get more time with Jessica Jones and Luke Cage - the latter’s second season hits June 22 and reviews say it’s one of the rare ones that outshines the original.

• Apex Books is helping to raise funds for author Brian Keene, who was badly burned in an accident and does not have health insurance. All proceeds of direct ebook sales of Keene’s solo novels with Apex will be donated directly to him. The GoFundMe continues and is within a few hundred of its $55,000 goal, but early estimates now put Keene’s medical costs as $300,000.

• Firefly. Still bitter. You can’t take the sky from me.

 

RIP

• Jackson Odell, 20, best known for The Goldbergs and iCarly. An actor and singer/songwriter since the age of twelve, he was found unresponsive last Friday in a sober living facility.

• Alan O’Neill, 47, best known as an Irish gun-runner on Sons of Anarchy, apparently of a heart attack. O’Neill was born in Ireland - so yes, the accent was real - and worked on the Irish TV series Fair City as well.

• Jerry Maren, 98, last of the original 124 Wizard of Oz Munchkins who sang as part of the Lollipop Guild in the 1939 classic, presenting an oversized candy to Judy Garland. Maren also appeared in The Twilight Zone, Bewitched and Seinfeld, among many others.

• Anthony Bourdain, 61, chef and travel journalist, of apparent suicide. I hardly need to expound on this, since it was extensively covered by everyone, but the repercussions on his death continue days later (and the idiotic conspiracy theories).

If you are in crisis, help is available. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255; or text the Crisis Text Line at 741741.

 

Trailer Park

• Halloween. Again. For the last time. Again. #pleasedontsuck

• Funny. Sometimes a trailer keeps you all the way to the end, then loses you at the title. Unfriended: Dark Web was probably trying to draw on audience from the first one, but in this case, a truly creepy trailer gravely disappointed me by being connected to that lameness.

• I usually stick to feature films for the trailers because these days everything from books to TV episodes to Shakespeare in the Park gets a trailer. But this Netflixer of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects is particularly choice.

• Here’s my question about Serenity, which has nothing to do with Firefly, alas. Matthew McConoughey’s ex-wife, Anne Hathaway, asks him to help her do away with her current husband, who’s an abusive monster. Um. Is there any reason she can’t just call the police? Amazing cast includes Jason Clarke, Djimon Hounsou, Jeremy Strong, Diane Lane… very high-end for a potboiler. So hopefully there’s more to it than just the tagline.

• If you haven’t had enough Conjuring jump scares, The Nun is now pending. The trailer is nicely creepy, though I have serious misgivings about the admittedly entertaining Conjuring series.

• I’m still dumb-founded about giving Disney’s Dumbo to Tim Burton. (See what I did there?) Longtime Disney fans are curled into fetal positions remembering Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The teaser is out, and so far we don’t hate it. It looks like there are big story changes - Colin Farrell has two kids who help take care of Dumbo, Michael Keaton is an entnrepreneur who recruits Dumbo (separate from ringmaster Danny Devito); and we don’t see Timothy the Mouse or wisecracking punster crows anywhere. 

 

Coming This Weekend

• Incredibles 2, the movie we’ve all been waiting for seemingly forever. Reviews are strong, but it’s not like it matters: It’s Disney/Pixar, and we’re all going to see it because the first was… Incredible.

• Tag, in which grown men disrupt each other’s lives in an annual dick-measuring contest to see who’s the best. Or something. Unimpressed.

• Superfly, a remake of the blaxploitation original starring Trevor Jackson as Youngblood Priest. So far it’s not resonating with critics; 54 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

• Gotti, with John Travolta aiming for serious as the notorious crime boss of New York City. Someone pointed out that there are 44 credited producers on the movie, for which the reviewers rolled out their best terms: derivative, borderline nonsensical, connect-the-dots disaster, dismal mess… It has a zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Ouch.

 

Continuing:

Ocean’s 8, Solo, Deadpool 2, Hereditary, Avengers: Infinity War, Adrift, Book Club, Hotel Artemis, Upgrade, Life of the Party.

 

Finally: I made a big announcement this week, one that might affect this blog and definitely affects the rest of my work. Click here to find out what shenanigans are pending.

 

Happy Father’s Day!

Linkspam stands with artists in need

Mother Nature was one cranky lady two weeks ago, when a micro-cell storm hit the Art Outside festival at Schlafly Bottleworks. More than 60 local artists sustained terrible losses, both to their artwork and to their infrastructure - festival tents and display cases are not cheap, folks.

And speaking as a traveling artist myself, I am pretty sure my meager renter’s insurance doesn’t cover acts of God outside my home. I was not there, but if I had been, the loss of my stock and my  new tent would have been devastating. Some artists suffered a total loss; some tents were found hundreds of feet away on the other side of the brewery.

A GoFundMe has been set up to support the artists, and EZ-UP has offered a discounted rate for artists who need to replace their tents. As of this writing they’ve raised $15,000 of a $25,000 goal, but remember that’s only $378 per artist divided equally. That barely covers the tent, much less fixtures and the lost art. Raising more would probably be greatly appreciated.

Not a fan of crowdfunding? The site also has a list and links to all the artists, so you can peruse their work - buying their stuff helps them too! Good luck to all the artists, and may Mother Nature stick to quiet browsing next time.

• Speaking of GoFundMe: horror author Brian Keene was badly burned in an accident Tuesday. He has first- and second-degree burns on his face and body, and is in a lot of pain. Like many freelancers, he does not have health insurance, so a GoFundMe has been started to help with his medical bills and lost wages. Best wishes to Brian, who has been a strong philanthropist and mentor to many beginning writers, and to his partner Mary San Giovanni.

• Locals: The St. Louis Symphony goes psychedelic on Friday with “Music of Pink Floyd,” including a full rock band, lights and lasers.

• Pride. Mickey. Ears. They’re already selling out, even though they’re only available in the parks, not online. Naturally, there’s backlash, because being one of the first companies to offer benefits to same-sex partners, standing up to a national boycott in defense of Pride Days, and paying a salary 1.5 times that of the industry standard isn’t enough. (Am I the only one who remembers the ‘90s?) Hell with it. PRIDE MICKEY EARS, people.

(Not going to a park anytime soon? Neither am I, more’s the pity. You can get a Mickey rainbow pin online.)

• A really smart and thoughtful roundtable about women authors choosing to use pseudonyms and why. And then I spoke, and ruined the curve. Okay, okay, so I’m in the roundtable. It’s still an interesting piece from Sean Taylor’s blog. Did you catch the first roundtable, about challenges women authors face that aren’t usually faced by male authors? Here it is.

•• Full disclosure: I am in no way objective about the upcoming performance of Beauty and the Beast at SIUE’s Summer Showbiz Theater. Why? It’s my son’s collegiate theatrical debut. Look for a sadly unmarried villager; the head of the wolfpack; and a really tall spoon. (Hint: He’s all three.) And you can watch the rest of it, too.

Director Kate Slovinski said when she first saw the animated film, she was delighted to see a heroine who was an active participant in resisting the forces opposing her. ““In addition to a relatable and admirable heroine, I found great comfort in the tale of the Beast as well,” continued Slovinski. “As a young lady contemplating a new life ahead of her, I was terrified of the consequences that could come from making a bad decision. The Beast suffers a curse for a terrible choice he made, with seemingly irrevocable consequences. Still, somehow, he finds redemption and a life better than he dared imagine.”

Opening night is nearing sold-out, so catch your tickets in advance! Beauty runs June 15-24 at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. For more info, email [email protected].

• Many thanks to the Authors Guild and RWA for fighting back against #CockyGate. I hate the trend of tagging -gate on every controversy, but anything that keeps us aware of this kind of nonsense helps - especially since someone already tried to follow suit with “Forever.” Authors Guild and RWA joined forces to fight the “cocky” trademark in court and won. It’s not immediately apparent what will happen to authors whose books were pulled down or otherwise damaged during this utter nonsense, but other cocky books will go forward.

• In other crazy publishing news, Jim C. Hines has the smartest take yet on the agent-crook debacle. In short: a highly respected and prestigious literary agency is flailing after finding out its one and only money-man was embezzling, from the agency and from the authors. The fallout is still descending, but it doesn’t look good for the future of the company or for the authors who are now broke and owed more than $3 million. In the ensuing crazy, there’s been a call for better controls and/or eliminating agents entirely, which struck me as a bridge too far, especially considering how many publishers won’t deal with unagented authors.

• SOLO is now at $148 million domestic, $264 million worldwide. Somehow this is still being termed as a terrible failure, a flop…. I really hate that, because I enjoyed it much more than I expected, and it left off with wide possibilities of a sequel or three and I was really looking forward to that. It’s still the highest-grossing Memorial Day release in four years, and not far below the all-time highest release for that time.

The TLJ-haters are insisting that it’s “payback” for having Star Wars movies about icky girls, but I’m betting the “soft” numbers are because it’s only five months since the last movie, and they really should avoid flooding the market. There are two other Geek Films still in the theaters and Black Panther just came out of Blu-ray. We only have so much money, guys - and this production got a lot of bad press when they originally put it in the hands of dudebros looking for a cheap laugh.

Alternative analysis pointed out, wisely, that “if the franchise was able to survive Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, we have a hard time believing Last Jedi could do that much damage.” Instead, they note “uncharacteristically (for Disney) poor marketing." The teaser had only 10 seconds of the lead actor’s face, which didn’t do enough to sell him as Han or as hero, he said.

After the first weekend, I was protesting tagging it as a flop altogether, because it really was strong for Memorial Day. However, it’s lost 65 percent in its second weekend, which doesn’t look good. Folks, see the movie. It was fun, worthy of inclusion in the franchise, and beats the hell out of a lot of the other stuff out there.

• A smart analysis of the next phases of the MCU by ScreenRant’s awesome Lauren Wethers. I’ve already argued against killing a Black Widow solo film, but otherwise she’s very much on target, especially advocacy for a Ms. Marvel film and mixing in the X-Men. (Also, I will fight anyone who says we don’t need more Captain America. Cap is my Superman while Superman is hibernating.)

• Muahahahaha. The Heathers reboot TV show is canceled without even airing. I think someone might actually have watched it. It was already delayed since it “didn’t feel right” to premiere a “hilarious” series about bullying and murder in a school after the Parkland shooting (and all the other shootings). I already made my opinion clear.

• Sequel alert: Maleficent is up next, with Angelina Jolie returning as Maleficent, Ellie Fanning as Aurora, Michelle Pfeiffer as a new Queen Ingrith, and Chiwetel Ejiofor showing up as an as-yet unknown character.

• In today’s Asshole Damage Report, Kelly Marie Tran had to delete her Instagram after months of horrifying sexist, racist harassment and threats against her life. She’s been abused on Twitter, and some asshat edited her Wookieepedia entry to fill it with racial slurs.

You have to wonder what actually passes for thought in the mind of a man who thinks an actress’s portrayal in a science fiction movie deserves threats of rape and murder. How does that seem rational to him? Daisy Ridley, by the way, also jumped off Instagram after she posted about gun control while attending a tribute to the victims of the Orlando Pulse shooting. Gasp! She had an opinion, and they were off to the races.

Yahoo U.K. points out that people were horrible to Jake Lloyd after Phantom Menace too, but that was before the internet became what it is now - and, frankly, the viciousness shown to women has always been especially ugly. As Chuck Wendig pointed out on Twitter, “Their names change - MRA, incel, gamer-gate, comics-gate, sad puppies, Real Star Wars Fans — but at the heart of it is the same fragile rage born of the poisonous chemical combination of white supremacy and toxic masculinity.” Naturally, Wendig is now facing nasty harassment online.

• Brian De Palma is joining with two other producers for a movie allegedly inspired by Harvey Weinstein, using the Toronto Film Festival as backdrop, starring Rachel McAdams and titled Predator. All I’ve heard about it so far is complaints that the producers are all men - you know, like 95 percent of the movies made in Hollywood. I will reserve further judgment until I hear more.

You know, I should really just create a separate category for #MeToo and "Today in Sexual Harassment News," because sadly, I never run out of material.

• James Cameron will shoot the Avatar sequels using Sony Venice cameras with 3-D stereoscopic rigs with high dynamic range and incorporating high frame rates. If you know what all that means, you’re smarter than me. Fortunately, Hollywood Reporter translated that it’s a fancy 3-D native method of shooting, allowing the film to be basically the next step forward in 3-D.

Here’s my problem: if you can’t watch 3-D without a horrific headache, will you be able to watch the film? Cameron says the movie will be 3-D without the need for glasses — oookay — and I don’t know if that makes a difference to the small percentage who, like me, become terribly ill watching 3-D.

Also, might he remember to have a story this time? One that he didn’t crib from Dances With Wolves? The four sequels start hitting theaters in 2020, which explains why Disney created a whole new land in its Florida Animal Kingdom park around Avatar. (It’s pretty.)

• Locals: The St. Louis Public Library will serve free lunches to children Monday-Friday all summer. Partnered with Operation Food Search, six SLPL locations are participating: Carpenter, Carondolet, Divoli, Kingshighway, Julia Davis and the Central Library. According to Operation Food Search, one in four kids in the St. Louis bi-state area goes to bed hungry each night, and many only received a full daily meal at school. Details are here.

 

RIP

• Gardner Dozois, 70, longtime science fiction editor and co-founder of Asimov’s Science Fiction. He was editor-in-chief from 1985 until retiring in 2004, won 15 Hugos and arguably helped shape the science fiction genre in the latter half of the 20th century. He was also an author in his own right, columnist, journalist, editor of more than 150 anthologies, critic… His wife, Susan Casper, predeceased him in February 2017. In his final year, he published five books, two of them works completed but not yet published by his wife before her death.

• Kate Spade, 55, fashion designer and corporate leader, died by apparent suicide in her New York City apartment. The designer started her company in 1993 and has more than 140 retail shops domestic and 175 internationally, but she stepped away in 2007 a year after it was acquired by Neiman Marcus Group for $125 million. Coach Inc. announced plans last year to buy the brand for $2.4 billion. Spade had started a new handbag company, and changed her name to Katherine Noel Frances Valentine Brosnahan Spade.

If you are in crisis, help is available. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255; or text the Crisis Text Line at 741741.

 

Trailer Park

• It’s Star Trek 11: The Real One! Wait, no it’s not. It stars Doug Jones, Tim Russ, Marina Sirtis and Armin Shimerman. Fake-out. 5th Passenger is a sci-fi thriller with a pregnant officer trying to survive with her surviving crew in an escape pod when a mysterious life form attacks. Alien? I don’t care, it’s good enough to steal. Crowdfunded to life, this film caught attention at the Artemis Women in Action Film Festival, and sadly will be released on demand instead of in theaters, because we can’t have nice things.

 

Coming This Weekend

• Ocean’s 8, where we’re remaking the remaking of a caper film but with all women. I’m kind of iffy on the trailers, and Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t have a score yet.

• Hotel Artemis. This is that weird near-future thriller with Jodie Foster as the cranky doctor who runs a private hospital for criminals that depends on strict rules, and then someone breaks the rules. Wackiness ensues, if by wackiness you mean grim-faced criminals and a chain-smoking Foster. This might be too nihilistic even for me. Cast includes Jeff Goldblum, Zachary Quinto and Sterling K. Brown.

• Hereditary. Grandma was bonkers, Mom is barely holding it together after Grandma’s death and Daughter is… possessed? Are we talking ghosts? Demons? Madness passed down from generation to generation? Rotten Tomatoes gives it 93 percent.

 

Continuing:

I’m not going to give it a full review, but I was dragged kicking and screaming to Upgrade and it was not nearly as bad as I was anticipating. I expected a bloody, awful, wish-fulfillment revenge-fantasy mess, and I only got part of that. The lead actor was surprisingly nuanced in his portrayal, and while I saw the twist coming a mile and a half away and there were few surprises, it was significantly more entertaining than I expected. Honestly, if it had tamed down some of the gore-for-gore’s-sake and delved a little further into the issues around bioengineering that it briefly raises, it might have been a truly good sci-fi thriller.

Also continuing: Deadpool 2, Adrift, Avengers: Infinity War, Book Club, SOLO, Life of the Party, Breaking In, Overboard.